Code Pin — A Pinterest Chrome extension for developers

I love Pinterest, I use it all the time to save pages of products, posters, wallpapers and even app layout ideas. I’ve been using it as my visual bookmarking tool for a while now, keeping everything organised in different boards.

As a developer, a lot of my bookmarks are code related. But when I wanted to use Pinterest for that, it was impossible. The way Pinterest works relies a lot on images, that being it’s trademark characteristic, but then, in the same way, Github pages almost never have images.

For me, it didn’t make much sense that I couldn’t add a page to my Pinterest boards, I just had to find a way to do it. So I decided to make a chrome extension to solve my problem and a couple of hours later Code Pin was born.

The idea is very simple: if I could make an image of any page, I could save it to Pinterest and that is easy to achieve with a screenshot.

Using Google PageSpeed tool I was able to get a base64 screenshot of any page.

After that, I just need to upload it to some image hosting service since I needed an URL to send over to Pinterest. I used Imgur since it’s free and the API it’s quite straight forward.

The final step was the easiest, since the Pinterest API has a simple way to call its pin layout.

After that I just had to put up a simple logo (I’m not a designer, so you know, excuse me for that) and pay $5 to send the first extension to the Chrome Web Store.

I already started to save some pages on my own boards as you can see here.

You can download the extension here.

And you can (and should!) fork the project’s Git if you have any idea of how to improve it.

Originally published at gonelf.tumblr.com.